Frances Willard

Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard (1839-1898) was a prominent American temperance crusader and women's suffrage leader.

Frances Willard was born on Sept. 28, 1839, in Churchville, N.Y. Her idealistic parents moved to Oberlin, Ohio, in 1841, where both attended college. In 1846 they moved to Janesville, Wis. Frances (or "Frank," as she was called), her elder brother, and younger sister lived vigorous youths, despite the intense moral tone at home. At the age of 18 Frances informed her father that she would thenceforward determine right and wrong for herself. Her views, however, were a modernization of, rather than a deviation from, her parents'.

In 1857 Miss Willard attended Milwaukee Female College, moving the next year to Northwestern Female College. She was class valedictorian. In 1860 she began teaching and three years later taught science at Northwestern. She taught successively at Pittsburgh Female College and Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in New York. She also wrote essays. Her first book, Nineteen Beautiful Years (1864), memorialized her deceased sister. During 1869-1870 she toured Europe, spending some time at the Colle'ge de France and the Sorbonne.

Appointed president of Northwestern Female College in 1871, Miss Willard was ambitious to see women's opportunities expanded. When the college merged with Northwestern University, she became her college's dean and professor of esthetics. By 1874 she was convinced that her program would not be aided, and she resigned.

That year was a revivalist one for temperance advocates; Miss Willard participated in prayer and singing sessions. Rejecting outstanding teaching opportunities, she accepted the presidency of the Chicago Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and rose rapidly as secretary of the state organization and then of the national organization. By 1881, when she became president of the WCTU, she was an outstanding lecturer, organizer, writer, and policy maker. Her distinguished presence - warm, clear-minded, and eloquent, with an attractive sense of humor - was one of the WCTU's principal assets.

Miss Willard's unique contribution was her feeling that women's work and views were needed in all fields. One of her most famous slogans was "Do Everything." This point of view was opposed by temperance advocates who narrowed their goals to suppressing the liquor trade. Though Miss Willard helped form the Prohibition party, which influenced the election of 1884, she was also concerned about women's suffrage, peace, labor problems, "social purity" (a topic which many of her associates found indelicate), and Populism, among other causes. Her innumerable correspondents, audiences, conferences, projects, and devoted admirers took her to all parts of the country and abroad. In 1891 she became president of the World's WCTU. Her influence was especially strong in Great Britain. During a visit to New York City she developed influenza and died on Feb. 17, 1898.

Further Reading

Francis Willard's Glimpses of Fifty Years: The Autobiography of an American Woman (1889) reflects her era and its goals. Mary Earhart, Frances Willard (1944), is judicious and scholarly. Ray Strachey, Frances Willard (1912), helps explain what Miss Willard meant to her generation. Anna Adams Gordon, The Life of Frances E. Willard (1898; rev. ed. 1912), though adulatory, contains valuable abstracts of Frances Willard's writings.

Additional Sources

Bordin, Ruth Birgitta Anderson, Frances Willard: a biography, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Leeman, Richard W., "Do everything" reform: the oratory of Frances E. Willard, New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

(1839-1898), temperance activist and women's rights leader. Willard was born near Rochester, New York. In 1845 her father settled the family on a frontier farm in Wisconsin Territory. Frances grew up a tomboy (she preferred to be called "Frank") and did her best to get an education, despite her father's opposition. As a young woman, she preferred women's company, and her one serious romance, to a Methodist minister, ended badly. She found the ideas of women's rights inspiring and determined to dedicate herself to the elevation of her sex. The life she chose was female-centered, economically and emotionally independent of men. After teaching for several years and working for women's benevolent societies, she became president of the Evanston College for Ladies in 1871. Two years later, the college was absorbed into Northwestern University, and Willard became its first dean of women. But the university's president was her former fiancé, and conflicts over her position and his authority soon led her to resign.

In 1874, temperance activism became the focus of her life and the medium through which she expressed her feminist intentions. The year before, a "crusade" of praying women had swept through New York and Ohio, shutting down saloons and reviving the dormant temperance movement. In 1874 the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (wctu) was formed, and Willard was elected corresponding secretary. She saw in temperance a way to expand the public activities and civic awareness of conservative, middle-class, churchgoing women. Her sympathy with these women, coupled with her great organizational skills, made her the leading woman reformer of the era. She transformed women's rights, which had been hampered by its radical antebellum origins and New England roots, into a movement in tune with the conservatism of the Gilded Age.

Convinced that she could induce the wctu to support woman suffrage, she campaigned for its presidency and, in 1879, was elected to that office, which she held for the rest of her life. She began her drive for suffrage by calling for a "home protection ballot," a limited form of votes for women on temperance matters. In 1881, she introduced Susan B. Anthony, America's leading suffragist, on the wctu platform, and in 1882, she led the organization to endorse woman suffrage outright, decades before any other national women's association.

Willard transformed the wctu from a Protestant benevolent society into a multi-issue reform organization. She declared a "Do-Everything Policy" and set up dozens of departments to reform everything from obscene literature to labor conditions. By rooting her organization in values held dear by her female constituency ("For God and Home and Native Land") and by appreciating their need for expanded public activity, she was able to prevail upon most wctu members to follow her lead.

She attempted to use her considerable power as wctu president to influence reform politics. In 1882, she joined forces with the Prohibition party and in 1890 plunged into the formation of a People's party. But she was unable to commit the populists to woman suffrage or the prohibitionists to populism, and the women of the wctu found politics a final step they could not take.

In 1892, Willard went to live in England with Lady Henry Somerset. There, influenced by Fabian socialism, she decided that poverty rather than intemperance was the cause of social ills. These new beliefs, her many absences, and her failed political efforts eroded her organizational position, so that when she died at the age of fifty-eight, her vision for the wctu died with her.

Bibliography:

Ruth Bordin, Frances Willard: A Biography (1986); Mary Earhart, Frances Willard: From Prayers to Politics (1944).

Author:

Ellen Carol DuBois

See also People's Party; Prohibition and Temperance; Suffrage; Woman's Christian Temperance Union.

Quotes:

"Temperance is moderation in the things that are good and total abstinence from the things that are foul."

Frances Willard may refer to:

• Frances Willard (suffragist) (1839–1898), American educator, temperance reformer and women's suffragist
• Frances Willard (magician) (born 1940), stage magician

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